


Transition

by internationalprincess



Category: West Wing
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2002-05-08
Updated: 2002-05-08
Packaged: 2017-10-14 06:05:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/146185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/internationalprincess/pseuds/internationalprincess





	Transition

Transition

 

***  
1\. Passage from one form, state, style or place to another.  
***

*  
Form  
*

The messenger has brought yet another cardboard file carton into his office. It's joined the leaning towers already crowding him out. He's not ready to go yet, he feels like shouting at the messenger's retreating back, at the boxes. Instead he gets up and tears open the packing slip. The yellow carbon says it contains his belongings from Air Force One.

He slits the tape with a letter opener and tugs off the lid. There are a couple of floppy disks with cryptic notations on the labels in pencil. He'll keep those, but the bundles of paper drafts will go in the burn bags. There's a Duke coffee mug he can't remember ever carrying on to the plane, and a cartoon CJ once drew on the back of a press schedule of him and Josh looking like Bert & Ernie. Josh earned himself a cuff across the back of the head for suggesting she ought to pencil herself in as Big Bird.

There's his copy of 'The Little Red Book'.

That night Josh told Toby to rein him in. Toby thought Josh was talking about Bartlet, and so he repeated the conversation to Sam. "He wants you to do it so he doesn't have to do it himself," Josh said.

Sam knew Josh wasn't talking about the President.

No more long night flights, he realises. Now he has to be 'earthbound and burdened with practicality'.

He puts the lid back on the box.

*  
State  
*

Toby has notebooks filled with years of scratched out thoughts. Yellow legal pads bursting at their adhesive seams. The tiny spiral-bound kind he always has slipped in his jacket pocket. Sam was looking for a pink highlighter once and found a drawer full of these in Toby's office. Every single page filled with ideas and lists and words. Not a single one discarded.

Sam confines himself to his laptop and his books. He wonders whether this will have to change. He's met a lot of academics over the years. It doesn't strike him as likely that any of them managed to contain their life in a Powerbook. He imagines his new office to be littered with student term papers. Dog-eared xeroxes connected with his personal research. Book galleys, maybe.

A sort of ruffled order. More like...more like Josh's office.

*  
Style  
*

The tails can go. He tries and he can't think of a single possible occasion when he might be required to wear white tie. "Statesmen," he can hear the President say, and he is no longer one of those. But in his mind's eye he can only see Josh, leaning in to straighten his tie, his fingers brushing against his Adam's apple, causing the fine hairs on the back of his neck to leap to attention. The way Josh grinned at him as Sam declared that they looked good. They really did.

The way he later stood alone, listening to a boy thousands of miles away succumb to a terrifying force majeure, as Josh drew a distraught Mandy into the warm confines of his arms.

He suspects even the black tie can go, though it's not out of the realm of possibility that he'll still attend Democratic fundraisers, maybe an alumni ball, so it goes in the box.

He does know that he doesn't need so *many* ties. He won't have to keep a couple in his desk drawer either, for the times when he opens his eyes to find the seam of Toby's couch cushion has etched a red welt across his cheekbone. There won't need to be a clean shirt hanging on the back of his office door.

He will need civilian clothes, he thinks. He will need jeans and t-shirts. Maybe he will even need to ask Josh to return the thin black sweater he once left on the back of his couch after they watched football at Thanksgiving.

The sweater he later saw Josh wear in the office one Sunday.

*  
Place  
*

California would be warmer. The air would be cleaner (at least where he intended to look for a house). He would be able to sail on the weekends whenever he felt like it. He would have weekends.

And California meant distance. It meant not having to cross old paths. It meant not running into ghosts around every corner.

Ironic, he thinks, that he's more worried about the ghosts of a place he spent eight years than a place he spent eighteen.

***  
2\. (a) Passage from one subject to another in discourse.  
***

He will have to learn a new language, he realises, as he lifts binders off the shelves and packs them carefully into boxes. He is keeping his own words, but these words belong to the Democratic Party, to the Bartlet Presidential Library.

He thinks back to the first weeks of the campaign when Toby, exhausted and frustrated, cried at him to stop "writing like a lawyer". It took him a while, he thinks, to lose the rigid confines of legal language and become fluent in the sweeping rhetoric of politics. He wonders if the change to academia will be more fluid, the differences less stark. At least he's already familiar with being under qualified for a position.

He hopes he can find a teacher like Toby.

He can remember a hotel somewhere in the South. Sitting with CJ on a too-small balcony, the patterns of the plastic moulded chairs imprinting his skin through the damp fabric of his shirt. CJ stole a packet of Marlboros from an intern and he recalls the way the raw smell of the tobacco and her sweat mixed with the safer smell of magnolia in the night air.

"It was a great speech," she said, as she tried to recapture her hair in an elastic band to get it off her neck.

He can't remember now why he hadn't liked it. It was so early in the campaign and he was still so unsure of himself. He didn't answer her.

"I'm serious, Sam," she said, clinking her ice in her glass as she raised it to her mouth. "Josh said you were a poet. That you would be able to turn Bartlet's passion into epics.... He was right."

He picked at the sweating label on his beer bottle and wondered if Josh had ever read an epic poem.

He wonders what he'll compose now.

***  
2\. (b) A word, phrase, sentence, or series of sentences connecting one part of a discourse to another.  
***

It would only have taken a word to keep him from leaving.

Josh's face was hard to read, but the rigid way he held his body - the way he wouldn't meet Sam's gaze - was unsettling.

"There are schools on the East Coast," he sighed. "Hell, Sam, there are schools right here in D.C."

Sam held his breath. They'd had this conversation before, several times, but now it was late at night and Josh was on his doorstep.

"Do you want to come in?" he asked, and his voice sounded strained...older than he had expected.

Josh looked right at him then, his eyes dark.

"I shouldn't...I said I'd call Donna when I got home..." he said finally, taking a tiny step backwards. And Sam nodded and turned away.

It was more than what it might have been.

***  
3\. In music. (a) A modulation, especially a brief one.  
***

The music coming from CJ's office sounds familiar. It's Bach, he realizes, a cello suite. Though not the one that Yo Yo Ma played that Christmas. Nevertheless the haunting notes curl under his skin and a wave of nausea grips him. He can see Josh's bandaged hand, and he can hear Toby berating himself for not realising.

Sam didn't realise either.

He steadies himself against CJ's doorframe.

"You're being maudlin," he says to her when he finds her sitting looking out the window with her feet propped up on the sill, crossed at the ankles. She doesn't turn around.

"No, Toby's being maudlin," she responds, "I am being reflective."

He notices Toby for the first time, sitting on CJ's couch. Sam realizes that he is folding paper cranes, and that CJ's couch and much of her desk is littered with them. They spill onto the floor. The Transitional Briefing Book lies open in Toby's lap, rough edges bare in the center where pages have been torn from it.

"That's...I didn't...I didn't take you for the origami sort..." he mumbles in Toby's direction. His boss looks up at him briefly, but continues running his fingernail along a crease as he does so.

"It's an incantation," CJ responds, still without looking around. "Sadako here thinks if he folds a thousand..." She trails off.

Sam can't watch them anymore. He closes her door as he leaves.

***  
3\. In music. (b) A passage connecting two themes or sections.  
***

The music in the bar is almost deafening, and is too loud to be recognizable. He wonders why they picked this place, but as he pushes his way through the crowd to the back he finds that the table they commandeered is out of the way.

Leo looks up at him as he pulls up a chair and sits down, asking, "What kept you?" Sam shrugs and can't think of an answer.

Leo bangs his glass on the tabletop to get their attention. CJ's laughter is getting into Sam's hair, taking up residence with the smoke from Toby's cigar, and he wishes Josh's arm weren't resting along the back of Donna's chair.

Leo is saying something about their last days, about time served together in battle, but Sam can't hear him because the top two buttons of Josh's shirt are undone, and he can see the pale pink flesh that marks the beginning of his scar.

They're suddenly all raising their glasses and he follows suit, and Josh meets his eyes as they toast to "the real thing."

***  
4\. In sport. The process of changing from defense to offense or offense to defense, as in basketball or hockey.  
***

He's had enough to drink that he fumbles with opening the door of the cab, but not so much to drink that he knows what to say when Josh slides out after him and pays the driver. He climbs the steps to his building and turns when he realizes Josh hasn't followed him.

He's still on the sidewalk, hands shoved deep in the pockets of his overcoat, shifting his weight from side to side.

"You remember that day...in Manhattan?" he asks. "When I asked you to come work for Hoynes and you told me you were marrying Lisa?"

Sam nods and takes a step down, back toward him.

"I spent the whole trip to Nashua trying to think of what I should have said. How I should have told you not to marry her...But I couldn't...I didn't know..."

Josh sighs and pulls one of his hands out of his coat to rub at his forehead.

Sam takes another step down, and they're standing face to face. He waits for what seems like an eternity for Josh to continue.

"I don't...I don't want that to happen again..."

Suddenly Josh's hands are on his shoulders tugging him closer and Josh is kissing him. It's clumsy and hot and aggressive, and Sam's head is pounding and he can't breathe. Josh pulls back just as suddenly, his face flushed. Sam can feel tears threatening in his eyes.

Josh is waiting. Waiting for his reaction.

"I still have to go..." Sam finally manages, watching Josh's rapid breaths form little puffs in the January air. Sam's surprised he doesn't choke on the words. Even more surprised that the words can be heard over the sound of everything inside him tearing apart.

Josh exhales slowly. "I know...but I still had to tell you I don't want you to..."

Sam draws away from him until only their hands are still touching, arms outstretched. Josh squeezes his hand softly and Sam turns and goes inside.

The Post the next day quotes Emerson, "Beauty is the moment of transition, as if the form were just ready to flow into other forms."

Sam throws his copy into the nearest open box.


End file.
